HAWK project: monitoring elder people living alone

The HAWK project is about monitoring the elderly living alone through off-the-shelve movement sensors, through the development of a model of the elder’s home activity through artificial intelligence technologies. The activity being continuously acquired by the movements of the elder through their home (in his/her daily activities) is compared against the last trained model to provide insights about routines and deviations from “what has been learned”, in order to alert caregivers or professional service providers on warnings or alarms derived from those deviations.

The architecture of the system is the combination of AGILE gateway and S&C’s enControl IoT platform and smart home solution. At the AGILE gateway, we have developed a protocol for a commercial movement detector device (PIR), that one may capture movement events detected to fit the activity model. The protocol has been encapsulated within a dedicated docker container, allowing any other AGILE component to work with the PIR sensor. The protocol pushes PIR events to enControl IoT platform,where the activity model has been developed and deployed. Results from the model evaluation against PIR events are broadcasted using messages in a pub/sub architecture within enControl. This pub/sub connectivity is used to connect this output back to AGILE (GW) by a developed microservice, so it can be exploited by other AGILE components. The microservice is also a docker container, and it opens a persistent connection to enControl by using lightweight web sockets technology allowing real-time server push updates.

enControl is constantly monitoring devices data received from the gateway and, for example, when an anomaly is detected, it’s pushed immediately to the HAWK notifier microservice who then proceeds to parse the data and store it in a local database.

The HAWK project allowed us to explore a new gateway technology and architecture that provides more freedom on development for our enControl solution. Before using AGILE, we used a licensed gateway that constrained us in enlarging its existing functionalities, and, for instance, did not authorize us to develop and integrate new device protocols. AGILE technology has empowered us to do so by opening a door to explore open software architectures. Additionally, thanks to the help of AGILE, we were enabled to develop novel elder activity models through AI technologies and explore against real home deployment. The overall effort ended in a prototype showing full integration of the PIR device, the AGILE GW, and the enControl IoT platform by demonstrating the fully integrated functionality developed within the HAWK project. Thanks to AGILE, we have quickly arrived at a first working prototype and deployed our system in an elder’s home. The results of HAWK are important first steps for our business and continually encourage us to keep working to reach a commercial product.

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